98 / The Dark Horse/ Winter 2001-2002
RETROSPECTIVES: an occasional series
Frost in 1916
The following interview at Robert Frost’s Franconia Farm was published in The
Boston Post on 14 February 1916. It was written by a staff correspondent, Carl
Wilmore.
T
HIS VILLAGE IS FORGOTTEN BY THE WHOLE WORLD. Buried in the
snow, with more snow and more snow, nobody comes here. Once a day an
old man in a pung drives over with a few bundles, and leaves them, and drives
off again in his old pung; and the thermometer is way below zero, just now, too.
So what in the world can mean a jingling sleigh, with two city folks in
it, chasing over the snow out to the Notch, over Mt. Lafayette way?
That’s surely what the lone Straggler thought when the Post reporter
came up here. He almost asked the same question of himself. Who wouldn’t—
with twelve-below weather?
“Follow the road to the first bridge, keep to the right, take the second
bridge, and about a mile up there is a little house on the right; that’s where
Robert Frost lives,” the old woman in the deserted general store had directed.
So it was Robert Frost the Post reporter was after; Robert Frost, the man
who wrote North of Boston, the volume of the most original American verse in
years, which he had to go to England to get published and which has reached
goodness only knows how many editions in America since. And here lived
Robert Frost, the least known man in American letters, and one of the most
delightful, lackadaisical, lazy, whimsical, promising makers of verse in
contemporaneous literature.
More than this, it struck the reporter strangely to realize that in this poor
house, buried here in the snows in the out-of-the-way corner of the mountains,
lives the man whom England has recognized before his own America, whom
France read before we did, and whom they both hail as the one pre-eminent
American poet of today — a sort of modern Poe.
Robert Frost: good name — with twelve below.
And so the city folks drove on through the endless drifts and reached the
little house. It Iooked like a three-room affair, with an ell and a shed behind.
Nothing stirred, save a hint of smoke from the chimney.
“This can’t be the house,” the driver said. “A man like Frost wouldn’t live
here, would he?”
The reporter also had his doubts. So he piled through the drifts and
knocked on the rickety back door — the kitchen door.
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Nobody replied. Are they out in the woods? Is everybody gone? Is this
a deserted farm? But — the smoke ....
The door opened an inch. (People don’t throw open doors in twelvebelow weather.) A woman peeked out. In an instant the reporter thought:
college woman — teacher. Tall, serious face, hair simply brushed back; it was
the type.
“Does Mr Frost live here?” asked the reporter. He had to ask something,
though the woman herself had given the answer the moment she appeared.
“Yes, but he’s not up.”
The reporter made the usual apology for untimely appearance and all the
rest of it.
“I’ll wake him up and tell him.” And the serious-faced woman shut the
door and disappeared. The reporter wondered: a Farmer and not up at nine in
the morning? Mentally he said, “There’s a lazy, lazy fellow lives here.”
Out to the back, then, to join the driver slapping his sides, while the
horses stamped and steamed and shook off file ice that hung all over them from
nostrils to tails. The roosters and hens, awakened by the commotion in the midst
of this deathly morning mountain mid-winter silence, began to crow and cackle.
The horses bugged the sun; the blankets made them forget the twelve-below
weather.
The house stood on the road. Directly in front was Franconia Notch and
above, snow-clad and glittering, rose Mr. Lafayette and the others of his
companions, with Mr. Washington off in the distance.
The front door opened and a tall man in a brown suit, collar and necktie
and all, said apologetically, “Come in; come in.” And all hands went in.
It was nice and warm, with the aft-night heat of a country home. “Come
in and try to be warm,” he said.
If ever they get shy of heating apparatus in the nether regions, they can
come and get Robert Frost’s stove, and the broiling will be better than ever. The
stove reached from floor to ceiling. In fact, the room seemed built to suit the
stove. It was the heart of the house.
“I don’t usually wear a collar as early as this,” said the host as he leaned
back in a rocker, “but I wore these things last night to a meeting of a ParentTeachers Association and threw them beside the bed. So, I just naturally put
them on again this morning.”
What a lazy man’s explanation. The house seemed still lazily half
asleep—his writing table was covered with a myriad of letters which, he
sheepishly confessed, he had been too lazy to answer — admitted he was too
lazy, at that early hour of nine a.m., to take coffee before talking to his visitors.
He spoke of the village folk.
100 / The Dark Horse/ Winter 2001-2002
“They didn’t use to bother me,” he smiled, “but last summer a lot of
people came here to see us, and they got an idea we were of some account. So,
now they’ve elected me president of the Parent Teachers Association.”
The reporter remarked about the beauty of the hills (with a silent
reservation about having to drive six miles in twelve-degrees below-zero
weather), and through the two small windows of the parlor one could see Mr.
Lafayette and the White Notch.
“Yes — we adopted Lafayette long ago. I’m from Massachusetts (and a
Californian) by birth, but we have lived in New Hampshire most of our lives,
my wife, my four children, and myself.”
“Four children, did you say?” gasped the reporter. He hadn’t heard any
racket, the sure sign of four children.
“Oh, yes; they went to school early this morning. Lesley, my oldest girl,
is sixteen; then comes my boy, Carol; then Irma; and then Marjorie, who is nine.
Carol does most of the work around the farm.”
Carol did the work — what did Papa do? The Post reporter intended to
find out.
“Who chopped the woodpile that we saw buried in the mow?”
“Oh, I didn’t. You know, I like farming, but I’m not much of a success
at it. Some day I’ll have a big farm where I can do what I please” — he smiled
as though he had intended to say “loaf as I please” — “and where I can divide
my time between farming and writing.
“I always go to farming when I can. I always make a failure, and then I
have to go to teaching. I’m a good teacher, but it doesn’t allow me time to write.
I must either teach or write: can’t do both together. But I have to live, you see?”
“How old are you?”
“I’m forty-three. I suppose I’m just a bit lazy” (again he smiled, knowing
that the reporter had guessed it long ago); “so I’ve had a lazy, scrape-along life,
and enjoyed it. I used to hate to write themes in school. I hate academic ways.
I fight everything academic. The time we waste in trying to learn academically
— the talent we starve with academic teaching!”
“And when do you work?” (In a corner stood a homemade writing table
made of two short boards nailed together, which, he explained, he had himself
made to set on the arms of the Morris chair, so that he could be more at his
perfect ease.)
“Oh, I haven’t any set times. I write when I feel like it. Sometimes I write
nothing for months. Then I’ll work a blue streak, and I rave around all day till
it’s off my mind. I can’t do as many writers do, write to keep my hand in. I write
only when I can write — when I must write.
“I hear everything I write. All poetry is to me first a matter of sound. I hear
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my things spoken. I write verse that might be called ‘free’ — the free-versers
have accepted me —but I believe, after all, that there must be a cadence, a
rhythm, to all that is to be poetry at all. I don’t mean jingle. I hate jingle; I hate
rhyme for itself.
“I want drama, too. Some day I may write a play. But I avoid the sublime,
the ecstatic, the flights that three hundred — or is it three thousand? — minor
poets of America slop into the magazines month after month. Meaningless
twaddle, with a few worn-out tones — You know what I mean by tones? I’ll
explain presently — and with all kinds of ridiculous extravagances.
“We don’t get tones enough into our poetry. Our schools teach us we
must do this, must do that; and we do it. Even England isn’t tied to academic
teaching as we are. That’s why they have some real poets, where we have none.
We insist on form and on unity and the rest of the old stuff.
“Of course, I know there is a crowd of ‘emotionalists’ who threw all to
the winds except emotion. I think they’re perhaps worse than the intellectualists,
who are the other extreme. But a happy mixture, that’s it.
“When a man’s young, he’s an emotionalist. When he’s old an
intellectualist. Only about fifteen middle years are well-balanced. He should do
his big works then.
“But the mediocrities, how they do go on! Take, for instance, the
expression ‘oh.’
“The American poets use it in practically one tone, that of grandeur: ‘Oh
Soul!’ ‘Oh Hills !’ — ‘Oh Anything!’ That’s the way they go. But think of what
‘oh’ is really capable: the ‘oh’ of scorn, the ‘oh’ of amusement, the ‘oh’ of
surprise, the ‘oh’ of doubt — and there are many more. But these are disdained
by the academic poets.
“America must get away from the schools. Forget the books. I don’t
mean that one should strive for effects. There are people who write poetry as
if they said: ‘Let’s write a shocker.’ Others say: ‘Let’s write a best seller.’ ‘Let’s
write a freak.’ So they go on, turning out verses that are bad. Some of the free
verse —it is just stupid in its striving after sensation, isn’t it? It makes one laugh
— not with it, but at it, and at the writer.”
“What are you writing now?” — asked the reporter, trying to lure him to
himself.
He blushed. “Well, my publishers say I’m getting out a new book next
fall, but — I don’t know .... They say I’m going to get out a new one each year.
That’s how they do it in England.”
“Will your new poems be also about the country?”
“I shall always write about the country. I suppose I show a sad side to it
too often. It only seems sad to those who love the city. I used to think the mill
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people, scooting home in the dusk, were sad, till I worked in the mill and heard
them singing and laughing and throwing bobbins up at me as I stood up on the
ladder fixing the lights.
“I used to know a man once whom I’d drag out to the country with me.
He’d lean on a fence a moment, then jump up, sit down on the lawn, jump up
again, pick a flower, throw it away .... In fact, he was insane to be back in the
city — just couldn’t stand the country. The very people looked sad to him. That
was because he himself was sad. The country isn’t really sad ....
“To get back. If American poets will only try to use all the tones of life
and will drop the eternal sublime and see that all life is a fit subject for poetic
treatment, they will do better. We must have new subject matter, new treatment
of it, and we must employ the neglected tones and forget the overworked ones.”
He talked more: of his English friends, of his American co-versifiers
(and he mentioned names right out and said things he didn’t want printed); how
he had been accused of imitating Theocritus — “and I never even read
Theocritus, because I’m too lazy to bother with Greek”; how he makes use of
subtle psychological suggestions in such poems as ‘The Fear’ and ‘Home
Burial’ and ‘A Servant to Servants’; how a lady had said of one of his poems,
‘It is nice; but what would Henry W. Longfellow think of it?’; how he and his
family just “smouldered” by way of existence, “not really poor or lacking
anything, but constantly on the verge of having something”; how the Franconians
looked upon him, and he on them; and how he got along, or rather didn’t, with
his publishers — and much, much more.
It was time to go. He slopped into a pair of overshoes and saw us to the
door. As the Post reporter clambered into the sleigh, and the driver grasped the
reins, he shook hands with a quiet laugh.
“I’ll come to see you when I’m in Boston. I’d like to meet some people,
because I want to spread my gospel of getting away from those deadly
professors! Good-by!”
As the city folks jingled off over the obliterated road, in that twelvedegrees-below weather, the road didn’t seem so long, or the weather so cold,
or one’s ears so frost-bitten, because of Robert Frost. And this came to the
reporter: Some day, long years from now; will there be a Robert Frost Society,
whose object it shall be to preserve, as a memorial, the little old house buried
in the mountains, which the world of today passes by, and which was the earlier
home of one of America’s finest poets?